Manchester à la Canelleto !

You can click to enlarge the image if viewing on a PC or tablet.

This scene depicts Shambles Square, Manchester, on a hot and sunny evening in August in a week-long heatwave two years ago. I decided to get the tram into Manchester at lunchtime to do sketches and take photos. I waited until evening for the shadows to lengthen to take most of my reference photos.

This painting presented many technical problems. The first was getting the stretched canvas from an art supplier – Fred Aldous Ltd in Manchester – to my studio in south Manchester! The canvas was too large to fit in my car, and so I carried it to the tram, which was not easy on breezy day. Fortunately the tram wasn’t crowded because I needed the space of two whole seats and part of the aisle. Of course, I could have had the canvas delivered, and next time I paint a canvas of this size or larger I will do so!

The painting looks down, up, right and left. This presents perspective problems which only through experimental sketches could I resolve to create a single satisfying and realistic image. For reference photos I use a 50mm SLR lens, which has the closest resemblance our eyes. A shorter focal length would exaggerate perspective and cause bulging. Therefore, the painting is made up from around 12 sections.

The other problem photographers have when confronted with this scene is that it’s not possible to stand far enough back to get the whole scene in view without an extremely short – or “fisheye” – focal length, as can be seen on this small screenshot of a photo I found on the Internet. Despite the use of a fisheye lens, and all the severe distortions of straight lines, the photo still only manages to take in about half the scene that I have painted, i.e. it does not look nearly as far up or down. And horizontally it only captures about 70% of the scene in my painting, missing the two pubs on the left.

And so although my painting (and my other panoramic paintings) could be described as realism, it is in a sense unreal. In reality we wouldn’t be able to look down and left at the bicycle and at the same time look right, up the hill towards the yellow tram, not even with peripheral vision.

David Hockney has done similar experiments with perspective for his Bigger Picture picture landscapes (first exhibited in 2012), overcoming what he calls a ‘single static view’, both in his painting and photography/filming. For his filming, he employed a team to rig up 9 cameras in array on the bonnet of a Land Rover, each pointing in a slightly different direction. Personally, I find the results of Hockney’s Bigger Picture series beautiful, both his sombrely-coloured and intensely-colour paintings. The largest of his paintings are created on multiple canvasses. Hockney is one of the few modern artists I like. He is a fellow Yorkshireman too: we were even born in the same hospital (St Luke’s in Bradford), and, as Hockney says of West Yorkshire, we “spent our childhood in the gloom”.

I would love to paint a huge cityscape, of the scale, or even half the scale, of Hockney’s Winter Trees, using a ‘moving’ perspective that requires multiple canvases. It would have to be in a looser style than my Manchester paintings, and I could only feasibly do it to commission for a corporation that could host such a big piece. I could not indulge the immense overheads that would be required for a highly-speculative work of this scale. And frankly, painting a city scene of buildings and human figures, in a realism style with shifting perspectives, would be a lot more challenging than painting trees and grass! It would be very time consuming too, perhaps a full year.

Incidentally, my figurative painting that I’ve titled The Yorkshire Muse is set in Shipley Glen, a popular beauty spot near Bradford, only several hundred yards away from Salt’s Mill in Saltaire, which houses the largest permanent collection of David Hockney’s artworks. In deference to the Yorkshire maestro, I painted the trees in a Hockneyesque style!

The painted image is essentially a panoramic montage of the scenes around the Deansgate and Castlefield areas of Manchester UK that I have pulled together into a single convincing and realistic image.

Beginning with experimental sketches, I played around with the topography, perspective, and distances (shortening the platform for instance to bring the trams closer). I removed some nondescript features and constructions that were obscuring the distant view.

This area of the city developed rapidly in the 19th century, but its history goes back to the Romans’ colonisation of much of Britain. There are ruins of a Roman fort in Castlefield.

The title ‘Rain and Cotton’ sums up the city of Manchester: its notoriously wet climate and the cotton industry that brought Manchester, and ultimately much of the world, into Industrial Revolution. Manchester was nicknamed ‘Cottonopolis’ in the 19th century, a time of phenomenal industrial growth but also extreme pollution and harsh living and working conditions for the average worker.

Today Manchester remains a significant exporter of cotton goods, although substantially less than at its industrial peak. The young commuters wearing cotton jeans add to the living-history narrative of the painting.

The four new tower blocks on the left – ‘Deansgate Square’– of the painting are luxury apartments. The recent proliferation of tall buildings in Manchester has attracted the nickname Manc-hattan. I like the juxtaposition in the painting (that could not have been achieved with photography) of the old and the new. We see the history of the evolution of transport since the Industrial Revolution: canal, rail, road, and – my favourite means of getting into Manchester city centre from my home in south Manchester – tram, or ‘Metrolink’. The tram has transformed Manchester and surrounding regions since its introduction in the 1990s, and its subsequent ongoing expansion.

Share this: